Published 4:00 am, Sunday, October 23, 2011

Zone One

By Colson Whitehead

(Doubleday; 259 pages; $25.95)

In Portland, Ore., a couple of years ago I left my hotel on a late afternoon to walk downtown to Powell's City of Books, turned a corner, and came face to face with several dozen staggering, costumed, made-up participants in the annual Zombie Parade.

It came to me as a shock that the lurching imitators of the living dead should pitch and roll their way through a town so far from Haiti, where the origins of the myth reside. Inside the bookstore I met up with a similar mob - a stack of newly published copies of "Pride and Prejudice and Zombies," the first of the apparently popular mashups of the supple and yet slightly austere Austen style and one of the pulpiest notions out of horror fiction - the walking dead.

The comedy of that collision has a distant echo in the talented Colson Whitehead's new work of fiction, "Zone One," in which we see a reverse mashup - the stately, near-Austenian sentences of one of our more interesting and innovative writers pressed into a worn zombie plot that, at best, seems a pale imitation of Max Brooks' much more impressive and entertaining "World War Z."

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A small group of zombie fighters works to clear the embattled borough of Manhattan of what the embattled government - based in upstate New York - takes to be the last of the infected inhabitants of this part of New York City.

As in a number of conventional movies about World War II, we get to meet the representative types of combatants, including, as usual, a black soldier, though in this case he - called Mark Spitz after the champion American Olympic athlete - is the hero of the group rather than the mascot. Before the "Last Night," the beginning of the zombie plague, this engaging young man from Long Island had hopes for law school. In this brave new world, he is one of the survivors who have become known as "pheenies" as in Phoenix, or those who rise from the ashes of the apocalypse and live to fight the undead.

Wearing special heavy garb and gear, Mark Spitz wades into battle after battle, in some instances coming close to being chomped on by various hideous versions of the walking, lurching, stumbling dead. Unfortunately Whitehead's prose bogs down the plot in similar fashion. The writing weighs the story down even in some overtly sensational moments, as when his hero recalls an incident when he was 6, when he walked in on his parents as his mother was practicing oral sex on his father, a moment that morphs into a scene during the time of the plague when he returns home to find his mother literally devouring his father.

"She was hunched over him," we read, "gnawing away with ecstatic fervor on a flap of his intestine, which, in the crepuscular flicker of the television, adopted a phallic aspect. He thought immediately of when he was six, not only because of the similar tableau before him but because of that tendency of the human mind, in periods of duress, to seek refuge in more peaceful times, such as a childhood experience, as a barricade against horror."

The barricade becomes a metaphor of sorts in the battle for Manhattan. Alas, Whitehead's manner of telling the story creates its own sort of barricades against enjoying it. As Whitehead puts it himself, in a sequence about the rest and relaxation time of the zombie fighters, "The major fast-food purveyors became, over time, reliable for a certain kind of experience and the reasonably priced surf-and-turf chain offered its own fortifying menu as the dead city continued its business in mirthless parody."

Mirthless, I'm afraid, is the operative word here for this zombie imitator in a long parade that celebrates the genre.

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